So the University of Phoenix was awarded a patent recently, and on first glance it looks to be another round of “patent the LMS and destroy the competition”. But it’s not.
Here’s the press release.
Here’s the patent.
It’s about automatically sequencing a series of learning objects based on the activity of students. Someone does something, and the order of presentation of some items is shuffled in response.
This is not a patent on learning management systems. This is not a salvo in an ed tech war to end all ed tech wars. It’s learning objects. Remember those? Yeah. Just barely. But now there’s a patent for one aspect of automatically sequencing them.